Port Authority

For anyone that thinks we are alone in Port Authority misery, check this out. This is from Perth, Australia. Now keep in mind, they drive on the wrong side of the road down unda….. but…common sense still has a role… except when dealing with the local bus transportation BLOKES!

So this is rush hour. This is a bus that had to pick up people from the LEFT and then the next move it had to make was get all the way over to the RIGHT for a right-hand turn!!!!! Kinda reminds you of being in Downtown Pittsburgh at Stanwix Street when buses are screwing everything up …. getting a green traffic light and then stopping 10-feet through the light to drop of 60 passengers while everyone else WAITS to get through the light.

What logic goes into this stuff?? It just continues to feed our theory that “it takes 1 bus, to screw up traffic!“

The sad part is, this maneuver made TOTAL SENSE for some “traffic engineer” to design this on paper or an APP. Yeah, sure. The bus has to cross 4 lanes of traffic during rush hour. That should be just fine!!!!!

And don’t blame the driver, they would have never designed this on their own!!!!

We’re thinking the designer of this route is that SAME smart alec KID that grew up at Seven Springs skiing across all of the trails…..crossing Green Square trails over Black Diamond Trails. Hell, why not throw in an “I stop for bingos!” Dodge Aries K car in the mix somewhere too???

Hey, like the German car engineers say to the Japanese car engineers…. the reason the German cars are better is because the German engineers actually DRIVE CARS!!! Hey Transportation Engineers, ya might want to get on one of those buses and see how these routes REALLY GO. And while you’re doing that, you will probably realize that the silly money-taking machines you’ve installed in the front of the bus take a dollar-bill slower than my Depression-experienced grandfather, Ya Jagoffs!!!!

Thanks to @beaup33p from Twitter in AUSTRALIA for the pic and for being our Honorary Jagoff Catcher today!!!!!!

Well, sooooo many people (including us) have picked on the underground, 4-stop Pittsburgh subway track that’s called the North Shore Connector. From the time the project was announced, thru to the day it left a bunch of runners stranded to.. well…we could go on and on… it’s been a topic of many jokes!

Sad to say.. here we go again. KDKA’s John Shumway ran a story about the North Shore Connector breaking down underneath the river yesterday. Some people had to walk, from the malfunctioning car, to the North Side from underneath the river (which we admit might have been kind of cool). Some excerpts from the the KD piece are:

“We were stuck down there for 45 minutes and the alarms were going off,”

The Port Authority’s Jim Ritchie says the train was stuck because of a mechanical failure, and to add insult to the situation, a false chemical alarm went off at the same time in the Gateway Station.

And the BESTEST one:

“For some reason, the communication to customer service was an hour behind; so they didn’t know for an hour that there was something to tell people waiting at the platform,” Ritchie (Port Authority Spokesperson) added.

Port Authority spokesman Jim Ritchie said there was no service from about 9:45 a.m. to 10 a.m., when officials started running a shuttle car back-and-forth on the outbound tracks. Service was completely restored by 11 a.m.

Mr. Ritchie said delays were minimal and that the trains were about five minutes off of schedule.

By the way, one idea we have is to take an extra $200 Billion, Gazillion, Trillion dollars and add glass panels to the underground tunnel. Then it will be like the “Pittsburgh Zoo Aquarium Indigenous Water Creature And Auto Junkyard” exhibit!!! Those broken-down-car-walks wouldn’t be so bad!

Back to the original point, we don’t know what TOTALLY happened and we don’t know if people waited over an hour (like in the KDKA piece) or 5-minutes off schedule (like in the News Paper Whose Name Is Now Banned By Us story). And we know that sometimes stuff breaks down at inopportune times.

But what we also know is.. once again this North Shore is the butt of news stories, stories about poor performance and poor communications to its customers and, HENCELY, a butt of jokes.

We’re asking can someone please, PLEASE, PA-LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE find people to take the jobs at the Port Authority Admin offices, like maybe the dudes that run the H-O train set-up at the Science Center, that actually KNOW HOW TO RUN A TRANSIT SYSTEM, Ya Jagoffs??????

So we’re sitting here thinking… remember when that Three Stooges episode showed people “volunteering” for the French Foreign Legion and, when they asked for volunteers to “step forward,” Moe and Larry stepped backward and Curly was left by himself in the front row!

That’s how we believe the previous and current leaders of the Port Authority and the leaders of it’s unions got their jobs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday, we received this email:

When you think it can only get worse, it does! How about this article?

“More and more, it’s (Port Authority of Allegheny County) becoming an agency that’s just there to pay out benefits and not run the public service that it’s tasked with running,” said Eric Montarti, a senior policy analyst at the Castle Shannon-based Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.

As an overview, the article describes in detail some of the reasons that the Port Authority is in financial ruin:

50 pension recipients are former managers who helped lead the agency

Pension costs soared 1,123 percent since the 2005 fiscal year, from $3.1 million to $37.9 million of a $333.1 million operating budget

Pension costs will be 34.5 percent of Port Authority’s $109.8 million payroll in the coming year

There are 3,294 people on the agency’s three pension plans. In addition to nearly 2,600 retirees

Haaa…. all of this in the face of a September deadline for 35 percent service cuts and more than 500 layoffs. Yeeeesssss.. that’s the way to make money.. cut service, make it more inconvenient and difficult to use than it already is AND THEN raise the prices to use that service to a level that bascially equals the Pittsburgh Parking and Theivery Authority rates for one hour’s worth of parking.

After reading the Trib Article that was sent to us, we are now assuming that, when we drop change into the bus’ fair box, it runs into a bucket that, when the bus gets back to the garage, get’s automatically dumped into manilla envelope which is then sealed and mailed to someone named “Amy” at the AARP Magazine subscription desk so that all of the retirees can be kept up to date on cruises and the world’s best mall-walking locations!

Of course, one of our FAV Jagoff post topics, former union prez Pat “Potty Mouth” McMahon got himself a nice $60k + pension too! Oh, glad he feels that pain of those drivers he represented!!!

Who keeps hiring these Port Authority “leaders?” Where they all failed airline pilots and boating captains that continued to run their vessels into the ground???? Hey.. maybe it’s time to channel the spirits of Moe, Larry and Curly to take over the administration of the Port Authority.. how could they do any worse?

It would make for a great name.. the Dewey, Cheatem and Howe Authority, Ya Jagoffs!!!!

Special thanks to “Tom C” from our email list for sending us this story and being our Honorary Jagoff Catcher today!